Using Microsoft App Centre

If you are writing an app then you want some sort of reporting and diagnostics functionality that you can use to monitor your apps. Can I suggest the App Center by Microsoft.

You create an account, add your apps and then just add a Nuget to your projects. It is as simple as that.

Call stacks from crashes with the exception. I could immediately see where my app was crashing in the wild (no error handling in the properties the XAML was bound to). I could tell by the exception what was happening, so it was easy to fix. All this is logged by version number as well.

Error logging. So you have fixed the error and wrapped it all in a try/catch just to be safe. In the catch you collect any errors that still make it through and report them back to base. You can also add info to it like which method was it, which comic was it, what was it expecting, things like that. With that I can tell which comic was causing the most problems.

Analytics tells you how many users there are per day. You get a breakdown of which devices they are running and which version of the OS. Where they are, things like that.

Of the features I haven’t used, the ability to build and distribute to beta testers seems good.

My only criticism is that live user data gets mixed up with the development and beta test data. So you should change to a new version number once a release has gone out the door and any crashes or error still open against the old number should be marked as ignored. This should make the new crashes more findable.